Yes but it's reasonable that they didn't. For quick hacky scripts you really want a lightweight syntax that supports interactive REPL exploration. Kotlin is the first language that manages to combine a strict static type system with a Python-weight syntax, and there's a REPL too although I don't think it gets much use. These days notebooks are a better replacement for REPLs anyway when doing data analysis, but Kotlin only got support for such features very recently.